Awakening
by DebC75
Summary: Castle had a dream like this once… sort of


**Castle, Castle/Beckett, someone handcuffed them together and lost/took the key**

_He leaned closer to the girl - a brunette with eyes almost like Beckett's and why the hell was he thinking about Beckett when he was about to get some? And boy! Was he ever about to get some! He could see it in her eyes, which just happened to look a lot like Beckett's even though they weren't - and his fingers slipped into the curling ringlets of hair behind her neck as their faces drew closer together. Her ruby red lips parted in anticipation --_

"Castle," she moaned.

"Call me Rick, please," he whispered against her skin and then he went back to kissing her.

"Castle! Castle!" Her words took on an urgency he usually only saw during the act itself and not during the first stages of foreplay.

"You really can call me Rick, you know," he reminded her, a little bit crossly. And then she kneed him in the balls.

"Castle!" Beckett punctuated his name with a kick in the shins. "Wake up!"

"I'm awake, I'm awake!" he shouted, startled, and fell out of bed, taking Beckett with him for some unknown reason. He couldn't figure out why he was in bed with her either, which was odd. It took him a minute or two to get his bearings so he could take stock of the situation that presented itself. He and Beckett were in a strange - at least it wasn't his, not that he'd ever seen hers - bedroom, both of them stripped down to their undergarments, and they were handcuffed together.

No, it wasn't a bedroom, he corrected as he looked around. It was a hotel room. A cheap one, at that.

He lifted his hand - and hers with it - and grinned as a stray thought escaped his mouth. "Well, whattya know. I've had dreams that started _just like this_. Only, you were dressed up as 'naughty cop' and the handcuffs were fuzzy and pink -- ow!" Beckett smacked him, hard. "What was that for?"

Beckett smacked him again and extracted herself from the pile of _them _on the floor and stood up. "For thinking of me as a 'naughty cop' and for looking at my chest," she informed him as she hauled him to his feet as well.

"I wasn't looking at your chest. I would never look at your chest," he protested, making a show of averting his eyes.

"You will, and I just wanted to get it out of the way. My chest is off limits where your eyes are concerned," she said by way of establishing precedence. "I don't want you getting any ideas."

"Well," he huffed. "Maybe I don't want you getting ideas about anything of mine, either."

"Anything of yours?" Beckett echoed skeptically. "Why in the world would I do that?"

"Why wouldn't you?" Castle pouted. He twisted around to look at his backside. "I happen to have a very desirable tushy. There are blogs posts devoted to it on the Internet."

"And you know this how, exactly?" she asked, amused and also a little horrified.

"Well, I ... ah, you see... " Castle fumbled and then said, "it's always good to know what people are saying about you."

"Whatever you say, Castle," she said, dismissing it. "Right now, I'd settle for knowing where the hell we are and how we're getting out of these cuffs."

"They aren't yours?" he asked, earning himself another smack to the arm. "I'll take that as a definite 'no' then." He rubbed his arm and pouted. "I don't know why you keep hitting me, Beckett. I didn't do this!"

Her expression softened, but only just a little bit. "I'm sorry, Castle. You're right. You didn't do this. It's just that I have no idea who did."

He nodded, and looked around the room. Their clothes were on the nightstand across the room. "What's the last thing you remember about last night?" he asked out of curiosity. "The last thing I did was..." he thought a moment "...stop off for coffee after I left the precinct."

Beckett nodded. Castle had asked her to join him, but she'd still had paperwork to do. However, she had stopped in their usual coffee shop afterward. He'd been long gone by then.

"You don't suppose..." They both said at the same time. "The coffee was drugged?"

Castle raised an eyebrow. "If that were true, why would whoever did it go to all the trouble and just leave us alone? And with our clothes, no less?" He pointed to the clothes in the corner. "If we work together," he suggested, "maybe we could get dressed enough to just walk out of here?"

"If our clothes are here," Beckett added, "maybe our phones are, too. I could call Esposito or Ryan -- "

Castle's other eyebrow rose, too. "You want Ryan and Esposito to see us like this?"

"You're right," Beckett agreed quickly. "We'll call your mother." 


End file.
